


wasteland, baby!

by demogorgns



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death, Child Abuse, Childhood Friends, Childhood Trauma, Don't say I didn't warn you, F/M, HUGE trigger warnings for csa, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Major Character Injury, Major Original Character(s), Past Child Abuse, Past Sexual Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slow Romance, Teen Romance, for real, lots and lots of hozier referenced, multi-season but starts in season 3, nothing 'on-screen' but in the past/implied
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-04
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2020-01-04 21:10:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18351776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/demogorgns/pseuds/demogorgns
Summary: "All the fear and the fire of the end of the world, happens each time a boy falls in love with a girl..."Carl stumbles on a half-wild girl in the woods outside the prison, and they change each other, even in a wasteland.





	1. all the fear and the fire of the end of the world

**Author's Note:**

> for real, huge trigger warning for csa. let me know if i step over a line anywhere
> 
> thanks for reading!

Green eyes stared out from the black and tangled undergrowth. Wild as a summer storm that was close to raging, boiling in the steel sky. The girl’s lips trembled, drew back from her teeth in a snarl, and Carl’s eyes took in the rest of her – hair tangled and dirty brown with soil, twigs trapped in it, hanging around a face smudged with earth and what was easily recognized by him at this point as dried blood. Her clothes were ragged and similarly streaked with blood and gore. Her blood-stained cut-offs revealed bare knees and shins that were skinned and scuffed, right down to her ankles, encased in high-top sneakers the colour of which could no longer be determined under the mud and blood. A passing glance might have identified her as one of the dead. But Carl knew better. Her eyes were not the milky, blank orbs of the shambling corpses that roamed the woods. They were a febrile, earthy green, saturated with colour, irises ringed in inky black.

She looked into his eyes, and he looked back into hers.

“Hi,” he murmured. It seemed like the thing to do, under the circumstances. She flinched at the sudden noise. “I’m Carl,” he said softly, keeping his distance. She said nothing, merely followed him with those huge vivid eyes.

“Whatchya got there, kid –” Daryl abruptly aborted his question as his eyes alighted on the girl crouched in the undergrowth before Carl. The crossbow was up and aimed before Carl could say a word.

“Wait! She’s alive,” Carl said quickly. The girl cringed back, looking from Carl to Daryl with rapid anxiety, but did not run. Daryl lowered the crossbow a little and squinted at her.

“You sure?” he queried grimly. Carl nodded.

“Yeah. Look at her eyes.”

The girl remained silent, face twisted in a snarl, a faint growl emitting from the back of her throat. The cords of her neck stuck out, white lines beneath her dirt-streaked skin. Carl wondered if she could talk at all as Daryl peered at her, leaning in cautiously, crossbow still up. The girl leaned back as he leaned in, but he kept coming, and Carl sensed he was getting too close even before the girl went for Daryl.

Daryl cursed, rearing back and dropping the crossbow in surprise, grabbing her arms before her fingers, curled into claws, could scratch his eyes. Daryl held her arms down, wrapping his own arms around in her in a bearhug that she struggled against fiercely, teeth gnashing with as much grim determination to rip flesh as any walker Carl had ever seen. For a split second he wondered whether he hadn’t been wrong, and she was one of the dead after all, but her struggles were getting weaker and he could hear the breath ripping out of her in exhausted pants. Walkers didn’t breathe, and they didn’t get tired, either.

“She’s alive alright,” Daryl grunted, struggling to hold her. She twisted like a fish, trying to slip down and out of his arms, but he held her tight. Soon, she quieted down, until she gave up the fight completely, nearly going completely limp in his arms. She was a skinny little thing – Daryl could feel her ribs through her shirt. And she was scared shitless – he could see that in the wet sheen of her green eyes. “You gon’ go for me again, or can I let you down?” he asked in a low voice. She glared at him, panting for breath. “Come on, girl. I ain’t gon’ hurt you. Neither is he.” Daryl jerked his chin at Carl, who was still staring like a startled deer. Some of the rage went out of those luminous green eyes, but none of the fear. Still, Daryl sensed she would not longer try to bite him, so he loosened his grip. She pulled away and stumbled, clearly dizzy. She wasn’t in a good way, that much was obvious. Maybe some of that dried blood on her clothes was hers.

“What do we do?” Carl asked. His blue eyes were big with anxiety, and Daryl nearly smiled as he caught the question beneath the question – _Can we keep her?_

“Go get Glenn. We better decide this one together.”

Carl nodded like a private to his sergeant major and hoisted his gun more securely on his shoulder, before trotting off back down the path. Daryl estimated he’d be back within the minute, going as fast as his legs could carry him. The girl stayed on the ground, starting to shake even in the muggy, humid air. Daryl guess she wasn’t cold – hungry, more like, or just sheer exhausted. Whatever Glenn said when he got here, Daryl had already made up his mind; no way was he leaving some scrap of a kid out here to starve or get eaten by those dead fucks. No way in hell.

Daryl was right. In no time at all Carl appeared around the bend in the track again, this time all but dragging Glenn with him, who stopped dead when he saw the girl, and rubbed a hand over his mouth. He stepped up to Daryl’s side.

“Where’d she come from?”

Daryl shrugged. “The kid found her. When I come up they were just looking at each other, her in the bushes. Look like she came up from the woods. Look like she’d been there a while, if you ask me.”

“See anyone else? People she might be with?”

“If she was with people, they’d have fed her better. Or they’re assholes. Either way, she’d be better off with us.” Daryl appeared to be stubbornly avoiding Glenn’s real question.

“You know what I mean,” Glenn continued in a lower voice, glancing at Carl, who was watching their deliberations anxiously. “Do you think she’s a trap?”

Daryl glanced at the trees as if expecting to see figures crouched up there, watching them. “Don’t know,” he admitted after a pregnant pause. “But I don’t wanna just leave her out here if she ain’t. She looked scared, Glenn. Real scared.”

“We’re all real scared,” Glenn said softly. But there was one member of their little hunting party left to consult.

“Well, boss,” Glenn asked Carl dubiously, “What do you wanna do with her?”

Carl looked from Daryl to Glenn, and then to the girl. She was sat on the muddy ground, shivering a little, hair over her face and arms wrapped around her knees. _Dad won’t like it. He’ll say we can’t trust her._

When she looked up at Carl through the muddy, dirty tangle of hair, she looked to him to be on the verge of tears, but trying desperately to hide it. Above the defiant jut of her chin, her full lower lip wobbled tremulously. Carl had thought her older than him when he first caught sight of her, but now she was out in the open, he could see she was his age, maybe younger.

_Fuck Dad._

The prison was alerted to their return by the familiar rumble of the bike, and Maggie, who had taken gate duty that day, pulled back the chain-link with an ear-splitting shriek. The car came through first, Glenn driving, Carl riding shotgun. Daryl’s bike rumbled through behind. Through the dust it kicked up, Maggie had to squint, but she could have sworn she saw a fourth person, skinny arms wrapped around Daryl’s waist, riding behind him on the bike.

“You were supposed to be hunting,” she said half-teasingly as Glenn opened the car door and stepped out. “I hope you’re not proposing we eat _her_?”

“We couldn’t just leave her out there, Maggie,” he countered wearily. Maggie watched as the girl swung her leg over the bike, stumbled and nearly fell. Carl moved to catch her, but she jerked away from him, eyebrows knitted in a fantastic scowl. Carl put his hands up in a universal gesture of surrender and backed away a few steps.

“Yeah. She seems just as sweet and helpless as a little lamb,” Maggie smirked, voice dripping with sarcasm. The girl looked more like a feral animal than a human, hair a wild dirty tangle, face streaked with mud and blood. Her face was twisted in a perpetual scowl, full brows drawn over her big eyes. She looked around the prison yard like a bear in a trap, turning this way and that. Maggie didn’t like the way she seemed to be clocking all the gates and doors.

Glenn shrugged helplessly. “What else could we do?”

 _Oh, sweet baby. You could have left her for walker bait. Maybe it wouldn’t have felt right, but it would have felt more right than all our throats slit in the night._ But Maggie couldn’t bring herself to say something so harsh, so she settled for her own shrug. “Rick won’t be happy.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” Glenn agreed. All the ride home, he’d been mulling that one over. When Rick saw the kid he would demand they kick her back out again, maybe in nicer words for Carl’s sake, but that would be the gist. Glenn didn’t want to think about what he’d do about that. Alright, things were bad, but could they really be so bad that they’d be suspicious of a little girl? That they’d leave her to die?

_Pretty much that bad, yeah._

Glenn shook his head as if he could physically dislodge the thought.

“She got a name?” Maggie asked.

“She won’t talk.”

Maggie gave Glenn a look of mild despair. “Seriously? You find some kid in the woods who won’t even tell you her name, and you think its cute to bring her home with you?”

“She could be mute, Maggie. She looked scared. I don’t think she’s dangerous.”

Maggie surprised him then, by planting a soft kiss on his lips. “You’re too kind for your own good.”

Daryl brought the kid into the prison, Carl darting ahead of him. “Wait here,” he muttered to the girl, who cut him a dirty look. _I ain’t no dog, mister,_ was what that look said, but she didn’t move.

In the distance, he heard Beth and Carol call a greeting to Carl, and the boy telling them about the hunt in breathless, excited tones. Smiling a little to himself, he followed the kid into the cafeteria, while Maggie and Glenn stayed with the girl.

“- And we met a girl,” Carl finished in an oddly nonchalant tone. Beth and Carol shared a glance.

“A girl?” Beth said, smirking a little. “Is that so?” Carol was also smiling fondly, but when she spotted Daryl it dropped a little.

“He’s telling it right?” she asked in a low voice, coming over to Daryl. “Where’d she come from?”

“It’s…well, just hold on a second,” Daryl said warily, figuring it was best to keep the explanations until they had everyone gathered. He wished Carl hadn’t shot his mouth off the second they got in the door. “Where’s Rick?”

“Outside. Checking the fences, again.” Carol’s voice was full of apprehension.

Rick returned a few minutes later. When they brought the kid into the cafeteria, the reaction was fairly predictable. Suspicious eyes from all quarters. Beth’s eyes full of innocent concern, cradling Judith slightly away from the skinny girl in the centre of the room as if worried she would spring at the infant. Carol standing with a frown. Carl stole a glance at his father, at his thunderous expression, and quickly looked away.

“What’s this?” Rick asked in a stiffly measured voice. As if he couldn’t see just what it was. But he was trying not fly off the handle just yet, never mind the level of _stupid_ going on in that room at that particular moment.

“We found her in the woods,” Carl supplied sullenly, anticipating the argument. “She’s scared, Dad. She needs protection.” He didn’t _know_ that, exactly – the girl had still not said a word – but he felt that it was true, and he was going to make his father see it.

Rick tilted his head. “Protection? Protection from what, exactly?”

“She…we don’t -”

“Girl don’t talk,” Daryl said bluntly, interrupting Carl’s struggle for words, “But she’s scared alright. Figured we should take her in, see if we can’t get it out of her. Maybe whatever she’s scared of, we should be worried about too.”

“Maybe we should be more worried about her,” Rick growled. “Seeing as how we don’t know her from Adam.” He peered around Carl, who had instinctively stepped between his father and the girl, to get a better look her. She scowled, head down, arms wrapped around herself as if she was cold. She had the look of a savage dog kicked into submission. It was not a look Rick trusted one little bit.

“She’s just a kid, Rick,” Glenn interjected. “It didn’t look like there was anyone else with her.”

“She’s just skin and bones,” Daryl agreed, “If she was with a group, they weren’t feeding her. She don’t seem like a spy.”

“Kind of the point of spies,” Rick countered dryly.

“Dad, _please._ We can’t just leave her out there.” Rick looked at Carl’s pleading expression, his chest heaving and cheeks flushed with emotion, blue eyes full of desperation. The girl skulked behind him, but she wasn’t looking Rick or any other member of the group, but Carl. Her face softened when she thought no-one else was looking.

Rick cast a look at Maggie, standing next to Glenn. She shrugged. “I don’t know how we can be sure we can trust her. Especially if she won’t talk.” Her expression was regretful, but determined. Rick nodded.

He turned to look at Carol and Beth, both of whom looked guilty and vaguely unhappy. Beth looked from her sister to Rick and back again with increased twitchy anxiety. “I don’t know. It don’t feel…right.” She shook her head, helpless. “I don’t know.” She went back to rocking Judith.

“Hershel? You haven’t said anything,” Rick said finally; finally, after a long, tense pause, because he felt like he knew what Hershel would say before he opened his mouth, and that it would settle the matter, and frankly, Rick didn’t want to hear it. The old man was sat in contemplative silence at one of the metal tables.

“Let me get this straight,” he said slowly, after a while. “Carl, Daryl and Glenn find this young lady in the woods. They say she won’t talk, but she looks scared. She’s clearly malnourished. And you all want to send her back out into those woods.” His tone was not questioning, not outraged. He merely stated facts, in a calm, measured voice. He looked at the floor, not at Rick or the girl or any of the others, but they all shifted guiltily. All except Rick.

“We’d give her supplies. A knife, food, water, blankets. Whatever we can spare.”

“A girl with a knife…against all the horror out there.”

Rick was beginning to lose his patience, but only because he knew, in his heart of hearts, that Hershel was dead-on right. “She looks to have gotten on all alright so far, wouldn’t you say?” he asked between gritted teeth.

Hershel raised his head and looked the girl up and down as best he could from the angle that she skulked at, half-hidden in the shadows, head down. Even in the half-light of the cafeteria, she looked like she’d been dragged through Hell backwards. The more Rick looked, the more scratches and bruises he noticed on her. Beneath the collar of her dirty t-shirt, he could see a puffy necklace of purple and red marks that brought bile to the back of his throat.

“I wouldn’t say she does look to have gotten on alright, Rick,” Hershel sighed. “No, I wouldn’t say that at all. Before all this, when you were still a sheriff’s deputy, what would you have thought of a little girl wandering alone, with bruises like that on her face? What action would you have taken?”

Rick stared Hershel down. He refused to look at Carl, though he could feel his son’s eyes on him.

“She could sleep separate from the rest of us,” Carol finally spoke up. “So we know where she is, not roaming around at night.”

“Lock her up?” Carl asked, appalled. The girl’s head was up now; she watched the proceedings with big, wary eyes.

“Just until we can trust her,” Carol explained. “Just until she starts talking.”

“Maybe she isn’t talking because there’s something else, maybe some _one_ else, that’s scared her silent,” Hershel reasoned. “Someone who could be a danger to us here, that she could tell us about when she feels safer.”

Rick could rapidly feel the mood of the room changing. He sighed. “And if it’s all an act so we’d let her in, and she kills us all in our sleep and opens the gates for her friends to come in and take over? Anyone considered that possibility?”

Daryl snorted. “She’s six stone soaked through, at the most. Arms like wet tissue paper. You think that little scrap of a girl could take me? Could take you?”

“In our _sleep_.”

“Nah. One of us always keeps a watch. If we lock her in a cell like Carol said –” Carl made a noise of protest – “- Just until we all get to know each other a little better, kid – if we lock her in, keep an eye, she’ll be no trouble. And if she does have friends outside looking to come inside – handy to have a hostage, don’t you think?”

That was it. The final blow. Rick knew he’d been defeated on all fronts – on grounds of compassion, of strategy and of just plain common sense, they had him. Carl’s eyes were full of triumph. He knew he’d won.

 _Christ, but he’s like Lori sometimes._ Rick pushed down the wave of crippling grief.

“Fine. But she doesn’t wander.” Carl grinned and turned to the girl, but Rick stepped between them before he could say anything to her.

She was definitely no older than Carl. Rick had to stoop to place his face level with hers. “Hear that? You can stay, but you stay where we put you. We’ll feed you, clean you up, get you better clothes. You’ll be safe. As long as there’s no funny stuff. Got it?”

Green eyes, sullen and suspicious, looked out at him from under the tangled fall of hair. Funny, she didn’t have to say a word to express that she trusted Rick about as much as he trusted her. Nevertheless, he had seen that look before, taking statements from kids with bruises on their faces, or sitting in hospital beds, or kids with no injuries at all…on the outside. Kids who ‘fell down the stairs’. Kids who ‘tripped’. The police officer in him itched to know how this girl got those bruises.

“We’re not gonna hurt you,” he said in a low voice. “And the person that _did_ hurt you won’t do it anymore. Not from out there.”

After a long pause, the girl nodded, once. Rick straightened up.

“Carol, you mind finding her a clean cell?”

Carol smiled. “And some clean clothes too, I bet?” she asked the girl warmly. “And we’ll get all that blood off you too.”

The girl still said nothing, but looked at Carol as if she’d suggested they fly her to the moon. Carl stepped a little closer.

“It’s okay. This is Carol – that’s my dad, Rick…” he went on to point out every member of the group and introduce them. Beth smiled and waved when he got to her.

“…And the baby is my sister. Judith.” The girl’s eyes had a bit more light in them when she saw the baby. She gave Carl a questioning look. “Yeah, sure, come over and look at her.”

The girl leaned up on her tiptoes, and Beth leaned down to give her a better view of the baby in her arms. Despite himself, Rick tensed, but the girl did no more than look, and crack the smallest, briefest of fleeting smiles.

Carol put a hand on the girl’s shoulder, presumably to lead her away, but she flinched and spun away, glaring again. Carl shook his head.

“I don’t think she likes to be touched.” _No kidding,_ Rick thought. That reaction to physical contact, and the bruises, were painting a picture Rick did not like. “It’s okay,” Carl said gently. “We just want to get you cleaned up. And food – are you hungry? You must be.”

The girl’s expression thawed a little and she nodded. Carol gave her a smile. “Okay, honey. We’ll get you cleaned up, and then we’ll see about some food.” Carol guided her away, careful never to move to touch the girl. The girl herself stopped at the door and looked behind her, eyes focused on Carl. Carol glanced at Rick. “You want Carl to come?” Carol asked. The girl shrugged, but the answer was clearly the affirmative. Rick thought he saw red creep into Carl’s cheeks, and resisted the urge to laugh. A grin was spreading across his son’s face.

“It’s okay, I’ll come along. You want someone you know near, right?” Again, no answer but a shrug, which was clearly a yes.

“She can have some of my clothes,” Beth offered with a smile. “They might be a little big…”

“One of my shirts would fit her,” Carl supplied, so earnestly that this time Rick _did_ laugh, and had to choke it back and avoid the gaze of Daryl and Carol, who were also smirking. Carl remained oblivious.

“That’s kind, honey,” Carol smiled in a choked voice. _Oh, don’t you look at me Daryl Dixon, don’t you_ dare _look at me or I won’t be able to stop myself laughing -_

Carl left with Carol and the girl with a pile of clothes compiled from Beth and Carl, and all along the echoing corridor Rick could hear him chatting away to her, a warm and constant stream of information, trying to put her at her ease. A warm feeling of pride spread through Rick, married to a twinge of misgiving.

The woman with short hair – _Carol, her name is Carol –_ said they were going to the prison showers. The boy – _Carl –_ walked next to her. “- Hershel’s leg’s like that because he got bit by a walker, if you were wondering – no, don’t worry, he’s not infected, they cut off the bite before it could spread – he’s kind, he saved my life once – I got shot, still got the scar –” He had been talking like that since they left the cafeteria. She didn’t mind it as much as she might have. It was nice to hear another kid’s voice. It was nicer still to be around another kid again, not surrounded by adults – even if he was a boy.

They had reached the showers. The girl swallowed dryly. True, her clothes were close to rotting on her body, and her scalp itched beneath her dirty hair, and she could smell nothing but blood and gore and mud and sweat all over her. It would be _so_ good to be clean again. Still, she wasn’t ready to be naked in this place – or any place. Ever. Her palms itched.

They stopped outside the shower room. “Carl, could you wait here?”

“Sure thing.” He gave the girl a questioning look. “You okay?”

She nodded. _Liar._ Carol smiled. “Come on, sweetie. Let’s get you cleaned up.”

She tried to force her feet forward. Really, she did. They just wouldn’t go. “Something wrong, honey?”

The girl wiped her palms on her cut-offs, not that it did them much good – the pants were as dirty as her hands. She could feel herself starting to shake again – that bone-deep shiver that came from somewhere deep inside of her, uncontrollable, raising goose-bumps on her skin and chattering her teeth in her head. Panic rose up in her throat, cold and choking.

“I think she’d rather go in alone, Carol.” Jeez, it was spooky how he could do that – like he was looking through a window in the back of her skull, reading her thoughts exactly. He pierced her with his bright blue eyes again. “Is that right?”

The girl swallowed again, and nodded. “Okay honey,” Carol said, “If you’re sure you’ll be alright.”

 _Now that’s one thing I’m_ definitely _not sure of._

The water was not exactly scalding hot, nor was its flow particularly strong – but the grime was coming off her all the same. She watched the brown and red swirls form a whirlpool and disappear into the drain. Her head no longer itched, but her long hair clung to her back in slimy trails, like the tentacles of some monster. The bar of plain soap was doing its work, lifting off the dirt and blood, but nothing could wash the bruises from her thighs, her back, her arms, her legs. Her ribs moved up and down beneath her skin, stretched tight over the bones like a sheet. She felt squeamish every time her hands ran over her bones sticking up starkly in her shoulders or her collar-bones. Her skin stung all over, where the soap and water wormed its way into the thousands of cuts and scrapes – her skinned knees were on fire. She kept scrubbing, though. Now she was under the water, she wanted to scrub and scrub like she had in the shower at home before the world ended – scrub and scrub and scrub until her skin was raw and red, and still the skin-crawling no-clothes-on sick dirty feeling never _ever_ went away.

The shaking was starting again. She snapped off the water flow and stepped out, digging her nails into her palms until her breathing went back to normal. Then she dried off and stepped into the borrowed clothes – faded denim shorts that would be tiny on their original owner, but came to her mid-thigh, and a grey t-shirt with a paw print design too long in the arms which covered most of the shorts. She pulled her sneakers back on. No way in hell would she let them take her sneakers – she’d wear those until they dropped to pieces.

Carl was sat on the metal steps when she entered the cell block. He could not help but stare. She looked so different, it was hard to believe she was the same girl. Under the blood and mud her skin was tanned, her long legs scabbed and ticked with little cuts all over, especially her knees. Her features were delicate – a heart-shaped face was revealed, full-lipped. Her hair was the biggest change – washed clean and combed out, it reached right down to the small of her back, wavy and pale blonde. In the half-light every other strand glittered. Her lashes were long and soft and dark, brushing her clean cheeks with their newly revealed freckles whenever she blinked.

Carl could feel himself grinning. “Wow,” he said without thinking. A crease appeared between her thick dark brows. “I mean – you just look so different.” Heat crept up his neck. “I bet you feel better.” A shrug, non-committal. “Are you hungry?” A quick, firm nod. “Okay. Carol’s making something in the cafeteria for you. Then we can find you someplace to sleep.” Carl frowned himself. “I’m sorry they want to lock you up. They’re just scared. We’ve…been through a lot.” A wave of memories he most assuredly did not want to remember reared up, and Carl pushed them back. He looked back up at the girl. Her expression was soft and sad and understanding. She didn’t need to speak to make him understand – she got it. It was okay.

He stood up and led her to the cafeteria.

Later that night, she lay awake, staring at the metal underside of the top bunk. True to his word, their leader – _Rick, who was apparently a deputy, and you know what Daddy would have said to that, fucking good-for-nothing pig is what he would have said –_ had locked her in a cell in the next block over. The redneck with the crossbow – _Daryl –_ whose accent and mannerisms were so familiar and oddly, paradoxically comforting to her – was standing watch over the rest of the group. If she wanted to – how was it ole’ Sheriff Rick put it? _Kill us all in our sleep –_ she would have to get past Daryl and his crossbow to do it. The thought made her smile sardonically in the darkness.

The little bit of metal was cool in her palm, a good, comforting sensation in her palm. The edges of the key bit into her skin. The pain kept her heartbeat steady and her airways clear.

The click of the key in the lock was as loud as a gunshot in the cold silence of the sleeping prison. The girl winced, but she knew no-one could possibly have heard it. She padded, barefoot, from her cell, heart singing. She felt like a ghost of the prison, silent and invisible, moving from area to area and none of the sleeping occupants had the faintest clue she was there. This was how it should be. To be unseen and unheard and alone to her was like breathing – natural, and essential.

To be clean was good, and full of food that wasn’t raw and stringy was better still. To be behind walls, though – her rational brain told her this was the safest she’d been in months, but her heart, her marrow, sang to her in the darkness of danger, and the walls seemed to close in around her. The last time she’d been behind walls, she’d nearly died. She had to get out of here.

She had to be smart about it, though. No running off into the darkness. It would soon be autumn, and then winter, and though winters were not particularly extreme in the south she still wouldn’t survive in just shorts and a t-shirt. She needed food, too, and weapons. By Christ, she needed weapons.

The girl swung down from the metal steps and landed, light and silent as a cat, on the floor of the cafeteria. Food here. Then she would look for where they’d put the weapons – the armoury seemed like the obvious choice, but she knew it was overrun. Although the last time she’d been here, there had been dead in the cells, too, and they had cleared those out. Maybe they’d done the armoury too.

She froze at the click of the gun being cocked in the darkness. Before she could run, the voice came. “Stop there.”


	2. she is like a cat in the dark, and then she is the darkness

The girl froze. Her heart pounded, a hot deadweight, in her throat.  

“You’re gonna explain some things, girl. First of all, how you got out of your cell. Come here, sit down.”

The barrel of the revolver glittered in the bars of moonlight piercing the dusty air. Rick stepped into the light. He gestured with the gun to one of the metal tables. “Go on. Sit.”

The girl swallowed and did as he said. Every nerve ending in her body was alight. Her tendons ached with the tension. _If he even looks like he’s gonna touch me, I’m gone,_ she decided to herself. _He can shoot me if he likes._   _I’d rather be dead than let that happen all over again._

Rick sat down opposite her. He paused for a moment, and then replaced the revolver in his holster. Confused, the girl did not relax.

“Alright. Now maybe you feel a little safer, like Hershel said. So, talk. How’d you get out the cell?”

The key nearly slipped from her sweaty palm, but she managed to place it on the table. It glinted, guilty, in the shaft of dusty moonlight. Rick blinked.

“How in the hell did you get that?”

_Stole it from a walking corpse in a guard’s uniform, three days ago. Slipped right up next to it and away before it smelled me._ The girl shrugged. Rick groaned.

“No, no more of that. You need to talk. You need to talk _now._ Where did you get this key?”

The girl took a deep breath. “Stole it,” she choked out. God, how long had it been since she’d said a word out loud? Her throat scratched and itched like there was a thicket of thorns in there, and getting the words out was nearly painful.

Rick nodded. “Ah. So you c _an_ talk.” He picked up something in her Southern twang that didn’t sound exactly Georgian, that made him wonder if she wasn’t from out of state. “Alright. Stole it from who? From Daryl?”

She shook her head. “A guard.”

Rick frowned in confusion. “A guard…”

“A dead guard.”

Rick’s expression began to clear. “You were here before we were.”

The girl felt the danger again. _Better start talking some more now, and it better be damn good, or this cop’s gonna drive you out of here for good._ “Not long. Too many dead inside. I got some food. Then I left again.”

“You couldn’t clear the walkers out all by yourself,” Rick nodded. “So you just snuck in and took what you could. How? Where’d you get through? I need to know, girl. If you got in, someone else could too.”

“A gap under the fence. I pulled it closed behind me. There was a door with a broken lock.”

Rick sighed with relief. “We found that already. Sealed it off.”

_Don’t I know it,_ the girl thought ruefully. _Why’d you think I was skulking around in the woods in the first damn place, Officer Dumbass? You locked me out._

“Okay. So you’ve been in here before, you know all the nooks and crannies, I bet? Even if I locked you up again, you’d get out.” Rick was talking to himself more than to the girl.

_Damn straight._ She nodded.

Rick ran a hand through his hair and leaned back in his chair. A thousand more questions itched on his tongue, but he held back, like he’d been trained to do. _Start her off small, now you know there’s no danger._ When he’d first seen her sneaking about, his first thought was that he’d been right and she had friends on the outside she was about to let in to the prison, but he believed her when she told him how she got in and out.

“You gotta understand – we’ve had trouble before. Walkers let in by someone from the outside. And this is a big place. I can’t have people I don’t know wandering around, especially not at night.” Nothing but silent blinking. Rick sighed.

“Alright then. Now we’ve got that out of the way – you got a name?”

For a long second or two, she watched him in stony silence, and Rick thought he’d pushed too far even with that simple question and that she would refuse to say anything more. Then she slumped, head down so her fall of blonde hair fell over her face, and muttered: “Rhiannon.”

That was not the name he would have picked for her. It sounded too pretty, too clean and blonde and light. It did not match the half-feral creature that still crouched somewhere in the back of this girl’s green eyes. “Rhiannon…?”

“Campbell.”

“Okay, Rhiannon Campbell. What were you doing tonight?”

She shrugged again. It seemed to be her go-to. But she also spoke: “Leaving.”

She looked up at him from behind her hair. That kicked-dog expression was on her face again. Clearly she was waiting for him to say, _“Good. Leave,”_ but Rick didn’t think it was what she wanted to hear.

“You want to go?”

Another shrug. “I don’t like being inside.”

“Why?”

“’Cause…I can’t see the stars.” That was obviously not the whole truth, but she wasn’t about to tell Rick now, that much was clear.

“That’s not a great reason to leave, kid. You’re not safe out there. Here, you got big fences, food, water…” She said nothing, just watched him with those perpetually huge green eyes. Rick sighed and ran a hand down his face. “If I said you could sleep in one of the guard towers…under the stars…would you stay?”

_Now hold on just a second, Officer. A few hours ago you wanted me gone, now you want me to stay?_ Rhiannon thought sardonically. She didn’t say that, though. She thought about going on the run again, about sleeping up trees, tying herself to tree trunks with her shirt so she didn’t fall down and die in her sleep, about watching the corpses in the fields from the road, frozen with fear, until she got so scared she _had_ to run; about gasping in pain when her stomach cramped with hunger, and weighing that pain against the slimy stringy feeling of eating raw rabbit (and the soft-sharp feeling of snapping the animal’s neck and feeling the little bones move under its fur), about jumping at every sound until the fear got so bad she could feel her mind about to snap, like a rubber band stretched too far by a vindictive little boy about to let it fly at the back of some girl’s head.

Rick watched the thoughts tick over in her head, until she gave a nod; the smallest, most fragile movement of her head. He didn’t know when she’d flipped the script and had him holding his breath, begging her not to go, instead of _her_ being the one begging, but it had happened as naturally as breathing, and he knew it by the tension in his chest dissolving into relief.

“Great. So no need for you to go wandering off again, then?”

Another little nod. She perked up a little. “Can I have a weapon? A knife?” She’d feel so much better with a weapon on her, even just a little knife – without a way to defend herself, she felt naked. Rick shook his head firmly.

“No way.”

_Whatever. I’ll just steal one._

Almost as soon as he woke, Carl had rushed to her cell, and when he found it empty with the door hanging open his heart climbed into his throat and set up shop there. He turned on his heel and ran back to the other cell block, knocking into Daryl on the steps.

“Hey there!” Daryl caught him by the shoulders. “What’s the panic?”

“What happened? Where did she go?” Carl asked, trying to disguise his distress as best he could.

“What are you talkin’ about? The girl? She’s eating breakfast with the rest of them.”

Carl stared at him for a moment, then carried on down the steps. Daryl shook his head, bemused.

So there she was, just as Daryl had told him, wolfing down her food next to Beth. A sunbeam hit the back of her head and shattered into glittering gold all through her hair.

“Morning,” Carl called over to her, beaming involuntarily. She looked up from her bowl and simply stared at him, not quite glaring.

“Morning, Carl,” Beth said brightly.

After breakfast there was Judith to tend to, and clearing the fences and dividing watches and checking supplies, and although Carl tried to stay close to her, he lost track of the girl as the day wore on. He looked around the yard and found he could only see Beth, Maggie and Hershel, where before he could have sworn the girl was helping Hershel walk around the yard.

“Where’d she go?” he asked Maggie, who was nearest. She glanced around.

“Oh, hey, she’s gone. Sorry, Carl, I never noticed until now.” When he asked Beth, he got a similar answer. Hershel smiled.

“I believe she told me she was heading back inside.”

Carl started. “She talked to you?”

“She said a few words, yes. Not sure I’d call it a lengthy conversation.”

Carl raced off, and never heard Maggie and Beth exchanging giggles in the sunshine-filled yard, nor Hershel gently telling them not to make fun of him.

Inside, the sudden cool darkness blinded him, after bathing in the warm sunlight for so long. Carl had to search for a little while, until he heard a voice from the cell block. When he stepped in, he was blinded again for a second, by the sunlight streaming in through the high windows. Dust motes swirled like liquid gold in the sunbeams as he walked through them.

She was sat on the metal steps with Judith in her arms. She rocked the new-born carefully, remembering to support her head. Her ears, sharper than the others, even Beth, had picked up the baby’s cries, and on pure instinct she had gone to comfort the child. She bent over her, inhaling the clean scent of baby shampoo, and crooned to her softly, doing the only thing it felt right to do.

As Carl approached, he could hear her singing to Judith in a high, sweet voice.

_“There’s a yellow rose in Texas, that I am going to see,_

_No other soldier knows her; no soldier, only me,_

_She cried so when I left her, it like to broke my heart,_

_And if I ever find her, we never more will part…”_

Slowly, Judith’s cries quieted to a quiet, broken sniffle, and then to nothing. She stared up at Rhiannon, open-mouthed, cooing a little. Rhiannon smiled.

Carl cleared his throat softly, not wanting to startle the baby into crying again. The girl’s head jerked up.

“Hi.” Carl hesitated for a second, then approached. He sat down on the step just below the girl. She looked him up and down, then gave him a hesitant smile.

“Are you…are you from Texas, then?” She looked confused. “I mean, the song…” She nodded, a little. Carl raised his eyebrows, surprised. “How d’you get to Georgia, then?”

“Just ended up here, I guess,” she replied. Her voice sounded faded from disuse, though it had been clear and sweet when she was singing.

Carl’s face split into a grin. “So you _can_ talk.”

She said nothing at that, only rolled her eyes. _Uh, duh._

“What’s your name?”

“Rhiannon. Rhiannon Campbell.”

“Pretty…pretty name.” He could feel himself going red again. From this distance, he could see all the freckles on her tanned cheeks. Her lashes were the longest he could remember ever seeing. “You’re good with her.” He gestured to Judith, who had closed her eyes. “She’s not that quiet with everyone.”

“I’m used to babies.” Her accent had much more of a twang to it than Carl’s. He decided he liked it. He decided he liked it a lot.

“How come?”

Rhiannon looked at him for a moment warily, then decided she would answer him after all. “I had a baby brother.”

“Oh.” _Had._ Carl decided against asking her what happened to him. _She probably wouldn’t tell me anyway._ She had dropped her head back down to look at the baby in her arms. She used her little finger to trace her soft cheeks, gently, so she wouldn’t disturb her.

“Where’s her momma? Your momma, I mean.”

“She’s dead.” A moment’s silence. Carl didn’t look up at her. He concentrated on the specks of dust dancing in the sunlight. “I had to kill her.”

For a long while, nothing happened. Then Carl started as a hand came gently down on his shoulder. He turned to see Rhiannon, face full of solemn understanding. He could feel the warmth of her hand through his shirt. She didn’t say _“I’m sorry,”_ or _“I get it,_ ” or anything dumb like that. She just twitched the corners of her lips a little, squeezed his shoulder, and withdrew her hand to curl her arm protectively around Judith again.

“She’s a fierce lil’ thing.” She pronounced _‘thing’_ almost as _‘thang’._ It made Carl smile.

“Yeah, she sure is. Daryl calls her ‘little asskicker.’”

He heard Rhiannon laugh for the first time then, a sound as sweet and musical as her singing voice, echoing off the high ceiling of the cell block and reverberating all through the sunlit room.

Eventually the sun hung low in the sky, and the light in the cell block faded to orange. They could hear Carol calling them to eat. As Carl carried Judith out, Rhiannon hung back. She pulled the knife she had taken from Carl’s pocket out of her own and flipped it, the blade shivering silver in the fading light. She rolled her eyes at Carl’s retreating back and snickered a little to herself, though not unkindly. _Dumbass never even felt me take it._

She had been there a few days when she approached Beth with the scissors. The older girl was laid on her front in her bunk, scribbling something in a notebook, looking for all the world like a teen in a John Hughes movie. Rhiannon knocked on the wall.

“Oh, hi. What’s up?”

Rhiannon still didn’t talk, at least no more than she had to, and mostly to Carl at that. She held the scissors out to Beth, handle first, and then touched her hair.

“You want me to cut it?” Beth frowned. “But it’s so pretty.” It really was – long and smooth and shiny as silk, a lovely pale blonde with occasional darker threads that came out in the sun. Rhiannon nodded firmly. Beth sighed. “Come on, keep it. Maybe it’s not too practical, but you can always tie it back -”

Rhiannon sighed, rolled her eyes, and muttered under her breath: “Fine, do it myself…”

Beth sat up. “No, no, come on. You’ll mess it up if you do it yourself. Come here.”

They sat cross-legged on the floor, Rhiannon with her back to Beth. There was no sound but the soft snip of the scissors, and the whisper of locks of golden hair falling to the concrete floor.

“Why you want it cut so bad?” Beth ventured to ask. Rhiannon shrugged.

“It’s annoying.”

“It gets in the way?”

Rhiannon nodded carefully. “Cut it short, please. Above my shoulders.”

“Okay.” Beth cut in silence for a second. “Carl’ll be disappointed. I think he thinks your hair’s real pretty.”

Her tone wasn’t teasing, but serious. Beth herself had noticed the attention Carl paid to Rhiannon – it was pretty hard to miss. But Beth had come slowly to realise that the quiet, angry blonde girl sometimes seemed uncomfortable in his company, and she often touched her hair like it was bothering her. That, added to Rhiannon’s seemingly urgent need to chop it all off, had piqued Beth’s curiosity.

But Rhiannon only shrugged again, characteristically. “I guess.”

“…Does it bother you?”

“Nope.” Rhiannon took a deep breath. “I mean, maybe. A bit. I just don’t like to be looked at that much, I guess.”

“Want me to tell him to back off?”

“No. No. It’s fine,” Rhiannon said shortly. After a moment she said, so contemplatively that Beth nearly laughed: “Carl’s alright though, I guess. For a boy. You done?”

“Yep. All finished.” Her hair was a choppy bob now, chin length. It made her look fiercer and older, but no less pretty, if that was what she had been hoping to achieve. Beth gave her an old, cracked hand mirror to examine herself in.

“Thanks.” With that, she took the scissors and left the cell.

The sky was a brilliant blue as Carl crossed the yard. Autumn was still a ways in the distance. If not for the moans of the dead drifting on the faint breeze, it might have been a perfect day.

The guard tower blotted out the sun, so Carl didn’t have to squint to see her up there. She was _always_ up there. She hardly needed binoculars to keep watch, her eyesight was so sharp, though Dad had still not allowed her a gun, or any type of weapon. She even slept up there, and if you looked out of the windows of the prison, you could see her perched up there, sitting or standing or dangling her legs over the railing, kicking her feet into the sky. Carl rapped on the metal door, and it clanged hollowly back at him.

“Hey, up there.”

Rhiannon leaned over the rail. “Hi.”

“Can I come up?”

“Sure.”

When he got up to her level, he stopped dead. “Whoa.”

“What?”

“…Your hair…”

“What about it?” she snapped.

“It looks…different.”

“Beth cut it for me.”

“It’s nice.”

“I just…” Her face seemed to crumple, and she sat down, holding the rail, her eyes fixed in the distance. “I hate it long. I hate how it felt, hanging around my shoulders. M’always worried someone’s gon’ grab it, or something.” She said all this in a disconsolate mumble. Carl got the feeling her fear was no mere abstract worry, but a concrete phobia.

“No-one could grab it now,” he said gently. “It’s way too short.” He sat down next to her. She gave him a sideways grin. From her pocket, she drew a butterfly knife and began to flick it expertly, with sharp, confident wrist movements.

“Where did you get – hey! That’s mine!”

She dissolved into giggles. The childish, delightful noise carried on the breeze. “Yeah. I took it from your pocket. You never even noticed, dummy!”

Carl had to laugh too – he couldn’t help himself, her laugh was so rare and infectious.

“You little kleptomaniac!” That only made her laugh the harder. They both had tears in their eyes after a while, breath coming in spastic gasps.

“Where’d _you_ get it, anyways?” she asked after her giggles had faded somewhat, quirking an eyebrow.

“Found it.” On a corpse in some house, after the farm. Remembering the farm brought a sour, clenched feeling to his stomach, and he concentrated on the flick of the knife in her small, tanned, scarred hand instead. “I didn’t know how to use it, and Daryl wouldn’t teach me. Who taught _you_?”

Thunderclouds passed over her previously sunny face. “My daddy,” she said shortly. Her expression told him to press no further. A few times she had mentioned her father, but never elaborated, and Carl had felt, for reasons he could not define, a sick anxiousness whenever she did. The bruises on her neck still had not faded. Oh, Carl had clocked those, alright. He’d been through a whole lot, but he somehow sensed that he had not tasted half the darkness that Rhiannon had.

The butterfly knife flashed faster and faster, over and over. The sun had gone behind a cloud.


	3. honey, you're familiar, like my mirror years ago

The barrel made a hollow clang every time Rhiannon’s heels connected, kicking her legs as she perched on top of it. She watched the young boy and the older hunter argue in the yard with an air of idle amusement, chewing her lip.

“We need to practice!”

“ _You_ might need to. My shootin’ is just fine, thanks.”

“Come _on,_ Daryl –”

“You heard your daddy. We don’t need to waste no more ammo.”

“But if we don’t practice, and we miss when it counts, isn’t _that_ a waste of ammo too?”

Rhiannon smirked to herself. Carl was getting _real_ worked up about it. For her own part, she was _bored._ Daryl’s crossbow lay on a concrete step, momentarily forgotten, quiver full of arrows next to it. She slipped off the barrel without a sound.

“The sound’ll bring walkers from all around -”

“So, we use silencers –”

The arrow cut through the conversation like a knife through butter and buried itself, quivering, in the rusting carcass of the barrel on the opposite side of the yard. Carl and Daryl both stared at it for a moment, and then turned in almost-comical unison to look at the one who fired it.

Rhiannon lowered the crossbow, grinning. The arrow had gone _right_ where she had put it, _right_ there, as she had known it would. Her blood sang.

“Put it down!” The growled command interrupted her reverie. Suddenly skittish, Rhiannon lay the crossbow down and skipped back a step or two. Her palms itched. An echo from the past reverberated through her mind – _You’ll get it now, girl. Oh, you’re in for such a surprise, such a goddamn_ fucking _surprise, you little bitch!_

Daryl’s first instinct was to shake the kid – what the hell was she playing at? Trying to kill them? She could have hit him or Carl easy, broke the crossbow messing around with it, even put an arrow in her own eye – but when he looked at the girl, suddenly contrite and quivering with fear when he raised his voice, his anger immediately faded. “Ah, shit,” he muttered. “Don’t look so scared. I ain’t gon’ hurt you.”

Carl was examining the arrow. “Nice shot,” he said, voice filled with awe. He had painted a rough bullseye on the barrel in white paint, in the faint hope he would be allowed some target practice, and the arrow had pierced the center of it exactly.

Daryl glanced back. “Jeez. Beginner’s luck?”

Rhiannon shook her head, sullen and silent. She was still cringing away from Daryl a little, as she did whenever someone raised their voice around her. _Nope,_ thought Daryl to himself grimly. _Only when a guy raises his voice._

“Someone taught you?”

“Daddy.”

“Your daddy hunt?”

She nodded. Her expression said she’d rather be talking about literally anything else. _Your daddy a huge bastard too, huh?_ Daryl wanted to say. Instead, he cracked a smile. “He taught you good.” She gave a rare smile back. “I didn’t mean to scare you, just then. You know that?”

“Yeah,” she said, quietly. Carl plucked the arrow from the makeshift target with a metallic screech and Rhiannon jumped again.

“Hey, now,” Daryl said, barely realizing he had slipped into a softer, lower voice, like he was talking to a skittish animal. “It’s okay.” He moved closer, just so Carl wouldn’t hear. “Your daddy hit you, huh.” It wasn’t a question, because the answer was clear.

“Yeah.” She lifted her head a little. She opened her mouth, as if to say something else, and then closed it again.

“Well, he ain’t here to hit you no more,” Daryl muttered awkwardly. He wished he could say something else, something better.

Carl bounded up. “That was so cool!”

Rhiannon cracked a grin. “I’m better on a recurve bow,” she said with a modest shrug.

“I wonder if we could find you one,” Carl said eagerly.

“She’d kill us all,” Daryl muttered, “Give us all heart attacks. Next time, trying aiming _away_ from people.”

Rhiannon and Carl sniggered together.

They spent every minute of every day together now. Carl, and his little blonde shadow, following him around silent and often glaring, but obviously devoted. They had fence duty together today, patrolling around the perimeter, checking for weak spots and killing any walker that ventured close. They had adult supervision, of course – Carol followed them, a little behind. She let them be, though. They could both handle themselves – Carl had proved that already time and time again, and Rhiannon….well, you could just feel it on her. Carol watched them from a distance, blonde head and dark head (perpetually hidden under the sheriff’s hat) close together, not an inch of daylight between them.

Rhiannon clung to the chain-link with her fingertips, leaning back, flicking her hair out of her face with a shake of her head. It was already getting longer, a scant few days after Beth first chopped it. She pulled forwards and back on the fence, toes encased in her sneakers digging ruts in the earth.

“Stop that. We’ve got a job to do,” Carl scolded her gently.

“Boring job.”

“It’ll get pretty interesting if you keep rattling that fence.” Carl jerked his head at two walkers that were stumbling out of the wood a few meters away. Rhiannon let go of the chain-link sharply and watched them with wary eyes.

Carl shifted his grip on the sharpened length of metal pipe he was holding as the guttural snarls got louder. The first walker stumbled into the fence, sending shivers down the chain-link, and Rhiannon jumped back, limbs trembling. Her own makeshift weapon, a crowbar, hung forgotten from a quivering hand. The rotting face pressed against the wires of the fence, teeth snapping, and Carl stepped forward and put the sharpened end of the pipe cleanly through its eye.

He turned back to Rhiannon. “What’s up? You could have taken that.” She didn’t seem to hear him. Her eyes flicked from Carl, to the other walker approaching the fence, with frantic, nervous energy. Carl looked her up and down with sudden disquiet. “Are you frightened of them?” he asked with faint surprise. She had seemed so capable before.

“No,” Rhiannon spat back. She shifted the crowbar from one hand to the other, wiping a sweaty palm on her jeans and returning the weapon to her hand. The second walker hit the fence and clung to the chain-link with wasted fingers, snapping and growling at the two children stood just out of reach.

“It’s okay. Sure, they’re dangerous, but like this, one at a time behind the fence, they can’t hurt us. Go on, take this one,” Carl encouraged her, uncomprehending of her revulsion and terror.

Rhiannon swallowed and turned to the fence, taking in the yellow skull revealed behind the peeling skin, the flies flicking over the rotting flesh, the milky blank eyes. Her stomach turned, the familiar burn of bile rising in her throat. Her own breath was loud in her ears, almost drowning out the thunder of her heartbeat and the sickening snarls of the dead thing on the other side of the fence; and as she tried to bring the crowbar up to strike, it slipped from her grasp, too heavy for her spasming fingers to hold any longer. At the thud of the metal bar hitting the ground, the walker gave a savage snarl, pushing against the creaking fence, and in a paroxysm of fear, Rhiannon’s will gave way, and she turned and ran.

It was always her first instinct: _Run._ It was a powerful instinct, and hard to fight even now, behind the relatively safety of the prison fences. Before she knew it, her feet had carried her to the guard tower, her need to be high up and away from danger trumping any rational thought. She hauled open the rusting metal door with a screech and shut it firmly behind her, breathing hard.

Now she was alone in the cool darkness, her panic faded and was replaced with bitter embarrassment. Jesus, had she really just dropped her weapon and ran like a stupid little baby? In front of Carl? Hot, stinging tears of shame pricked the corners of her eyes. She slid down the rusted door and sat, arms around her knees, scowling into the gloom, making no movement to climb the damp concrete steps to the top of the guard tower. She waited for her silent vigil of anger and self-disgust to be disturbed by Carl and Carol, who no doubt would have followed her in confusion and concern at her behavior.

She did not have to wait long.

“Rhiannon?” Carl’s soft enquiry came muffled through the metal door. “Are you okay in there?”

“Rhiannon, sweetie? What happened?” Carol had come up behind Carl as he stood at the door. He shook his head.

“Just let me talk to her first,” he said, quietly confident. Carol hesitated a moment, then smiled obliquely.

“Okay. I’ll finish up the round. Yell if you need me.”

“Will do,” Carl nodded, in a manner that suggested he doubted very much he would need to. Carol smiled again to herself and set off back to the fence.

Carl turned back to the door. “It’s just me. It’s alright if you don’t want to let me in. Just let me know you’re okay.”

“I’m fine,” came the faintly muffled, but no less belligerent for it, reply.

“Are you sure? You seemed really freaked out.”

“I – I’m fine now. I just…I panicked, is all.”

“Will you let me in?”

A moment of silence. Then the metal door creaked open a crack.

“Come on then,” Rhiannon muttered sullenly. Carl slipped in before she changed her mind.

It took Carl’s eyes a moment to adjust to the gloom. Soon, he could pick out Rhiannon, half-way up the steps to the guard post.

“Coming up?” she asked.

Carl nodded, and followed her. They both emerged, blinking, under a blue sky scudded with grey and white clouds.

Questions danced on Carl’s tongue, but he chose the most pertinent one first. “What happened back there?”

“I told you. I panicked.”

“I just didn’t expect…you have killed walkers before, right?”

“ _Of course!”_ She whirled to face him, face flushed with fury. “I’m not some stupid _baby!”_

“I know you’re not – it’s just – it’s okay if you haven’t. I get it. It’s tough.” In the back of his mind, Carl remembered the walker in the creek, and later, the field bathed in moonlight, and guilt – hot and bitter as blood – flooded his stomach.

“I just…don’t like ‘em. They make me sick,” Rhiannon muttered. “Every time I saw one, I would just run.”

“How did you survive out there?” Carl asked, mind-blown. “So long, with no-one else around, without killing a walker?”

“The trees. If a big pack of ‘em came through, I just climbed a tree an’ waited ‘til they were all gone. Sometimes all night, if I had to.”

Carl could scarcely imagine. What it must have been like, clinging to the rough bark, shivering in the wind, while below the dead moaned and snarled and stumbled all around you and beneath you, waiting…

“Is that why you like the guard tower?”

She shrugged. “I guess. I always feel safer higher up.”

For a minute, they stood and watched the clouds move, wind moving their hair and plucking at their clothes. Then Rhiannon spoke, so quietly beneath the whisper of the breeze that Carl thought he may have imagined it: “I feel safer with you.”

Carl glanced sidelong at her, but she wasn’t looking at him, her eyes fixed on the horizon. “I want to kill one,” she said in louder, clearer voice.

“Really?”

“Yeah. Maybe if I do it once, I won’t be scared anymore.” She didn’t sound certain, glancing to Carl for confirmation.

“Yeah. Maybe.” He looked at Rhiannon for a second, and grinned. “Let’s do it.”

Carol had done her job well – by the time Rhiannon and Carl had emerged from the guard tower, the fence was bare of walkers in both directions. Rhiannon shook her head. “Don’t matter. Follow me,” she said, voice laced with grim determination.

She led him down the fence, to a spot far away from the gate, where the woods encroached on the prison; thick and tangled undergrowth and tall grey sentinels overshadowing the fence, branches nearly brushing the chain link. Once, the prison would have maintained it, kept the trees trimmed back to prevent nature from reclaiming the concrete and metal, but it had been allowed to spread freely for a while now. The fence was rusting here, though it still looked relatively secure.

Rhiannon stopped at a certain spot and began sweeping the ground with her foot, clearing away loose dirt, dead leaves and grass, until the bottom of the fence was revealed. Carl could see a small gap – well-hidden from those who did not know of its existence, and impossible for a walker to find, too small for an adult to squeeze under – but, as Rhiannon pulled the chain-link up, clearly big enough for her and Carl.

“You want us to go out? Into the woods?” Carl cringed at the fear in his own voice, and Rhiannon raised her head with a smirk.

“Now who’s being a baby?” she teased.

In response, Carl grabbed the fence and pulled it up enough for him to slide under. He stood, brushed dirt and leaves from his jeans, and held his hand out to help Rhiannon up as she wiggled under the fence after him. Her hand was warm and soft in his. He realized this was the first time she’d allowed him to touch her, allowed _anyone_ to touch her. She stared down at her hand in his, as if realizing the same thing, and then abruptly let go.

“All we have to do is find one walker, right?” she said brusquely, moving away from Carl to glance over the dense undergrowth and decaying wood that lay before them. “So, let’s get going.”

The sun was still high in the sky, slanting through the branches. It was like being underwater, the shafts of light piercing the depths and warming the water all around. They walked together in companionable silence, the dense carpet of dead leaves and mulch muffling their footsteps. Autumn was coming. The air was still and thick and warm, like honey.

Carl stole glances at Rhiannon as they walked. Her face was clouded and unreadable. She wore worn blue jeans that were a little too big for her, clinched with a belt and turned up at the cuffs, and an old corduroy jacket that covered her hands a little. The too-big clothes made her slight frame look even smaller, more delicate. Her curls fell over her face. She paused for a moment in a shaft of sunlight, tipping her head back, hair falling over her shoulders. Her eyes were closed as she basked in the warm light. A slow, glowing smile spread over her face.

“It’s nice to be out here again.”

“Seriously?”

She shrugged, turning to him. The sun glowed on her shoulders and made a blinding halo of her hair. “It might not be safe, but it’s free.”

Carl stared at her, confused as ever. She was so hard to understand. So full of contradictions. It was magnetic, somehow. He didn’t have the vocabulary to put it into words, exactly; all he could think of was that she was _fascinating,_ and that seemed weak, somehow.

She grinned, splitting freckled cheeks with white teeth. “Yeah, I know. I don’t make any sense. Whatever.” She started walking again.

The path they chose took them through a less wild patch of woods, the signs of past civilization in evidence everywhere. They followed a broken, splintered wooden fence for a while, the track under their feet deeply rutted by cars. Carl cried out a little when he saw the orchard.

“Holy shit!”

Apples, ripe and nearly falling from the branch, gleamed like rubies everywhere. They littered the ground too, rotting and soft, the thick, sickly-sweet scent of them rising in the air. Like the witch’s candy-cottage in a fairytale, the fence was splintered and broken, as if inviting them in.

The children grinned at each other widely, and hopped the shattered boards together.

The apples were so ripe as to nearly be spoiled, exploding in their mouths in a burst of sweet juices and soft flesh. They gorged themselves as the sun dipped slowly, inexorably lower in the sky, their quest all but forgotten. Rhiannon laughed as juice dripped down Carl’s chin, her hand darting forward to wipe it away. He flushed all the way up his neck, but she didn’t seem to notice.

They examined the abandoned orchard carefully, stepping over the broken branches. An apple tree had fallen in a corner, the break in the trunk white against the dark wood, its twisted and broken branches obscuring the sky. Its fallen apples littered the ground like spilled ball bearings. Rhiannon picked her way through them with grace, a half-eaten apple in her hand, chewing idly.

“I think there’s something back here.”

Carl joined her. He leant down to peer through the branches at the _something_ glinting behind them. “I think…it’s a house.”

The sun dipped behind a cloud momentarily, and Carl felt like he’d been plunged in a cold bath. He shivered involuntarily.

Rhiannon dropped her apple and wiped the juice from her hand on her jeans. She began pushing the branches of the tree apart.

“What are you doing?”

“Might be food in there. Ammo. Something we could bring back.”

 _So Dad doesn’t kick our asses._ Carl nodded. “Right.”

The house could barely be called that, and once they were standing before it Carl could see there would be nothing there worth taking. The door hung off its hinges, the doorway a gaping black mouth in the peeling, faded façade. Half the windows were smashed. Rhiannon walked around it a little, footsteps light, like a cat. When she put a foot on the porch steps, though, Carl grabbed her sleeve. She shook him off with an angry noise.

“What the hell?”

“You can’t just go in there. What if there’s walkers?”

Rhiannon shook her head impatiently. “That was the whole point of coming out here in the first place.”

“We should draw them out. It’s harder in close quarters. More dangerous.”

Rhiannon shrugged. “Fine.” She picked up another fallen apple, threw it up, and caught it with lazy ease. “Let’s draw them out.” She pitched the apple at one of the intact windows. “Out here, motherfuckers!” she screamed at the top of her lungs, as the apple shattered the window, the noise splintering the air. Somewhere in the wood, a flock of birds took flight.

“Easy!” Carl hissed, nervously watching the doorway. Nothing moved. For a long moment, Carl held his breath, then let it go again in a shudder.

Rhiannon laughed caustically. “Pussy. There’s nothing in there.”

She picked up another apple, wound up, let fly. Another window smashed. Carl cringed again, and then laughed, nerves ripping the sound from him. Rhiannon laughed too.

“Come on, it’s fun.” She threw an apple to Carl, who fumbled to catch it. He turned it over in his hands once or twice. “Come _on,_ ” Rhiannon urged. Carl aimed, and threw the apple. The smash was the most satisfying thing he had ever felt. All at once, it was like the guilt, the anger, the fear, was shattering along with the glass. Carl bent to pick up another apple. Rhiannon was laughing and bouncing on her toes, arms in the air, victorious. “Yeah!”

Rhiannon moved to climb the porch steps again as Carl broke another window, the rush surging through him. She made the porch and hovered at the broken door, glancing through the windows to either side.

“There might be something in here –” she started to say. Carl saw something moving in the shadows, too late.

_“Rhiannon –”_

Her scream split the silence. The walker loomed out of the darkness, reaching for her, and she stumbled back. The uneven planks tripped her, and she fell half-down the steps, scrambling. The walker reached down for her, a decaying hand grasping her ankle.

Time moved like dripping amber. Rhiannon could feel rotted flesh on the strip of exposed skin between her jeans cuff and her high-top sneaker, terribly, awfully soft, with what felt like cords of iron beneath, shockingly strong. It smelt like death – naturally. The rattling, choking moans echoed in her ears. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from its face – its _face,_ half-gone, dripping like melted ice-cream away from its yellowed skull, black flesh still clinging to the bone. One eye hung from a string of tendon. Rhiannon’s stomach heaved, and her head turned away instinctively to retch – and then she saw it. The hammer, abandoned on the porch next to her. She could have wept. Her hand flung out, scrabbled on the wood for it – she could feel splinters embedding themselves under her nails. Of course, of _course,_ it was just out of reach – maddeningly, furiously close. She screamed, fear and frustration mingling, and the tips of her fingers stroked the handle, and then it was in her hand, heavy and reassuring. She lifted it, and swung blindly, heart leaping as she felt flesh and bone give way to brain matter. She swung and hit, swung and hit, again and again, barely heeding the clotted blood and viscera flecking her face.

When Carl reached her, the walker was already long since eviscerated. Rhiannon lay beneath it, sobbing hoarsely, as the hammer finally fell still and slipped from her hand. Carl pulled the dead thing away from her, and Rhiannon to her feet; and she fell into his arms, still weeping.

Carl stroked her hair numbly. He was aware he was mumbling something, sweet nothings meant to comfort. “It’s over, there it’s over, it’s okay, I got you, I got you…” One arm curled around her back, the other held her head gently. Her own arms were wrapped tight around his chest, squeezing the air from him. He could feel her tears soaking through his t-shirt. “Let’s go home…let’s just go home.” She was nodding frantically into his chest.

They walked back in silence. Carl jumped at every sound, but Rhiannon just seemed numb, head down, staring at the forest floor. The sun was going down, the shadows growing longer, and in every one lurked another threat, another monster. Carl kept a firm grip on his sharpened pipe, and half an eye on Rhiannon, who had her arms wrapped around herself and seemed to be trying to bury herself in her too-big jacket. He had wiped the blood off her face himself, with his hoodie.

Every step closer to the prison was a relief.

 _Almost there…almost there, almost there, almost there._ He resisted chanting it aloud, but only just. A snap made him turn sharply.

“Did you hear that?”

Rhiannon was stood in the shadows. She shook her head. Carl turned slowly in a circle, sure he had heard something, seen a scatter of movement in the undergrowth –

Rhiannon watched him warily, her own ears aching from every noise, straining. Carl’s back was to her, and so he didn’t see the hand reach from the shadows, clamp on her mouth to muffle her screams; nor did he see the strong arms drag her back into the forest.

When he turned back around, she was gone.

“Rhiannon? _Rhiannon!?_ ”


End file.
